Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @04:53PM
from the or-to-make-your-officemate-telecommute dept.

coondoggie writes "IT pros want to telecommute — so much so that more than one-third of those surveyed by Dice.com said they would take a pay cut for the chance to work full time from home. In a survey conducted by the careers site, 35% of technology professionals said they would sacrifice up to 10% of their salaries for full-time telecommuting. The average tech pro was paid $79,384 last year, according to Dice's annual salary survey, which means a 10% pay cut is equivalent to $7,900 on average."

Why not? They're at school most of the day, and once home they spend the rest of the afternoon doing homework. Rather than having to find childcare for a couple of hours before and after school each day, I can just make sure they know I'm in my office downstairs if something bad happens. Days when I work from home are significantly quieter than days when I go in to work and have to deal with all the people at the office.

Why not? They're at school most of the day, and once home they spend the rest of the afternoon doing homework.

You obviously don't have children. Your plan only works if all children are at least 10 years old. I have a six-year-old, and there's no way he can entertain himself for three hours every day, unless he watches TV or plays video games the whole time.

Legos and books man, legos and books. Got my now 7 year old through the last few winters. Summer it's a little more challenging. He's an only child so going out to the yard to play unsupervised at that age is a little iffy. And when choosing between parsing someone's power point presentation to try to figure out their functional needs and going out to play frisbee with the kid, I'd much rather be out tossing the disk.

Not sure I'm reading you right but fyi my 5 year old goes outside to play with the neighborhood kids throughout the 4 seasons. In winter they make snow forts, etc. They run and play through our typical suburban neighborhood all afternoon. I whistle when it's time for dinner. He also toasts his own waffles, and makes his own simple lunches (half day kindergarten) picks out his own clothes to wear, helps watch his little sister when I'm working at home, and generally has a lot of independence. He turns 6 this week. You say your kid is 7 and can't play outside by himself??You really really need to check out FreeRangeKids.com. Do him a favor that will help him his whole life and go there now.

I have to agree with you. My 5 year old gained so much confidence when I started letting him go to his friends' houses on his own, not even accompanied by his big sister. Best thing ever for kids is to teach them to roam without your direct supervision, neighborhood conditions permitting.

Having friends over works pretty well too so long as they aren't the sort to constantly argue. I love finding ways for my kids to have fun without me so I get peace and quiet to get some work done.

Do you even lock your doors? Do you realize that most cities are not like this, and statistically, most humans live in cities?

I dont think anyone who lives in the country has anything to worry about letting their kids play out side. You do realize you are the exception here dont you? Im not sure how it is in USA but here you need to be 12+ to be left home alone, legally. A kid playing in the parking lot of my condo tower is quite far away from my home indeed.

Do you think people want to live in cities? do you think they want to live in condos??? with a family? You are living a charmed life so dont be hating. hell you get to work from HOME...

I have a 9 year old and a 10 year old, so they're old enough to do homework when they get back from school. But even when I started working from home on a regular basis, they were 5 and 6, and they'd play fine together for hours on end - give them some Lego, or paper, scissors and tape, and they were good. It helps though that they are so close in age that they can keep each other entertained.

I think you are not giving your first grader enough credit. You are probably correct that this particular situation is best suited to kids in maybe the third grade or later, I do recommend you give your six-year-old a bit more opportunity to explore self entertainment on a regular basis. It is a learned skill that will be very useful throughout his life.

Limiting the formal commercial after-school care to just one day per week and making use of an after school sports program, trading off with other

Agreed totally. Factor in the cost of commuting, and the TIME for commuting. I can get a lot done with all that time back, and I don't actually live that far from my office.

People in the greater Toronto area who have 90 minute commutes each way every day I can totally see this. That's 3 hours of gas, wear and tear on the car, and stress every single day. You could make that back with a pay cut easily, and you can't put a price on not having to drive through that traffic!

When you factor in commute time, gas and car maintenance, the need for 2 cars for family,child care and office politics it's definitely a pay raise.

Absolutely. $4.00/gallon. 80 miles per day, wearing out tires, going through oil, expiring that 70K mile warranty, approaching the inevitable equipment failures which translate to $$$$, plus all the time wasted on the commute. You bet. Plus, much quieter at home.

my experience has been that telecommuters fall into 3 categories: 20% are bums, and need to be fired. 5% are typical workers who like the flexibility. 75% are insanely ambitious and should be paid more, not less, because the time saved commuting goes directly into productivity, plus they never have to stop working, so they put in way more than full days.

I couldn't agree more. If I was able to tele-commute and lost 10% of my salary I would still save money in the long run due to the reduction in costs associated with getting to work (not to mention being able to buy a cheaper house away from the city). The only down side is that I have now moved from a pure tech role to a management role, which means I have to meet with people and video conferences just don't cut it.

Really, I would think that the company themselves should be willing to pay more for someone who telecommutes, due to needing less facility needs (space, cubicles, utilities) that would be saved from allowing telecommuting. And there is the added benefit of making sure all the equipment can be administered via telecommuting as you can then simply call up the IT group(s) and they can fix the problem from home without waiting the upwards of a hour that it would take to bring someone in to flip a switch/enter a password.

The problem is that most organization have no way of actually tracking productivity, so they pay people basically for being on site for X hours a day. Meaning that anybody who isn't filling a chair for X hours a day will be suspected of not pulling their own weight. Pay people for what they actually accomplish, instead of just for being there, and telecommuting looks a lot better.

In IT, there is another problem... ever try rebooting a server while logged into it remotely? Hint: All the connections go away the moment you reboot it. A lot of sites require that you either physically be on site, or take home with you thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

In IT, there is another problem... ever try rebooting a server while logged into it remotely? Hint: All the connections go away the moment you reboot it. A lot of sites require that you either physically be on site, or take home with you thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

Someone hasn't been keeping up with their enterprise grade equipment management. Just about every major vendor has a solution for this exact problem. I have over 500 servers at my work which I can shutdown, reboot, change BIOS settings, or fsck hard drives all remotely. Sun/Oracle has their ALOM/ILOM. Dell has the iDrac Enterprise. HP has their iLO. IBM has their Remote Management Agent.

Basically they are computers within the computer, with their own separate CPU, network, and OS, which lets you fully manage the production server by giving you the ability to show the console/display of the device send keyboad/mouse commands even at the pre-POST screen of the server itself (just like if you were physically at the keyboard/monitor attached to the system).

Mod parent up. Also (not sure about the other vendors) but with the Dell iDRACs, you can even load virtual media (that is, you can feed the iDRAC controller a DVD/CD ISO so that it looks like it's a disc sitting in a local drive) and boot from it to perform a complete OS Install remotely if you had to.

Basically they are computers within the computer, with their own separate CPU, network, and OS.

But what happens when you need to reboot the computer within the computer? You need a computer within the computer within the computer. But what happens when you need to reboot the computer within the computer within the computer? They need to invent a recursive computer within a computer.

Not to mention IEX/VMware allows virtual consoles and administration, and most are clustered environments so even on a physical failure of hardware, other servers in the same cluster farm take up the slack.

The only time you would ever (or should I say should ever) have an issue is if the entire power (on multiple grids) went out at the same time taking out the entire data center, and even then, most companies should (and if you don't, I will proceed to apply a baseball bat liberally to your IT Director's he

In IT, there is another problem... ever try rebooting a server while logged into it remotely?

Sure, use IPMI serial-over-LAN (for most newer servers) or a serial console server (for the old servers or routers/switches/etc.), and it is no big deal. With IPMI, if there is a problem, you can "hit" the reset or power switch remotely as well (for non-IPMI you can use remote power switches). If you have to deal with Windows servers, you can use KVM-over-IP switches; some vendors with IPMI also have KVM extensions (often via a web interface).

It is one these cases where firms are always tried to minimize cost, and workers pretty much are willing to work for whatever they can get. IT has been suffering form some time of an influx of people who are just trying to make a little money. Such people are often not looking to maintain the value of the profession, but simply trying to make a quick buck.

So, yes, there is cost saving to the firm, and this is a good argument to keep the salary the same, a second issue is involved. If one does not to be

In some companies, telecommuters tend to be forgotten about. This means that Jack Brown-Nose who comes in and does almost nothing will always be seen by the boss and keep an impression, while the co-workers who are at home actually working are invisible. End result: Jack tends to have an edge when it comes to promotions, or even keeping the job.

I've telecommuted for 5 of the past 6 years.I've saved thousands of Pounds on the commute into London.I can spend more time in the morning in bed.ButYou have to be comfortable with your own company.It can get lonely.You need the heating on all day in Winter.

On the whole it is great.Now... If I had a job it would be great. If said job offered me the opportunity to work from home then even betterAt the moment, this is all wishful thinking though.

On the bright side, if you telecommute you can be getting a blowjob while working at your computer! Try doing that at work! (I did... does anybody know of any companies hiring programmers in the Portland, Oregon area?)

You'll save 3-6K in gas, parking and transport alone. Pick up another $800-$1500 in phone, cell and internet reimbursement. Get back 1-2 hours of your day that you used to spend commuting. Not a bad deal.

Won't you take a pay cut for us. It's the only way to keep the jobs away from those $2 an hour people we know overseas... It's a perfect deal, you get to provide your own office space and we get a fancy new yacht to bang illegal under-age girls on.

Transportation is budgeted as my #2 expense, just behind rent. Last year I had major car issues, and transportation may have exceeded housing in raw $ spent. Add to that the amount of time I would save and it becomes even more obvious.

You save money on time and logistics, but you also have to create a work area in your home. Certain organizations have sqft requirements. You also need to establish locked areas to hold files and documents. And, ultimately, you're no longer allowed to check-out. With a standard job you are expected to be responsive during your normal work hours (say 9--5:30). With telecommuting the work hours shift and you will easily find yourself on call 12 hours a day. Additionally, you lose camaraderie with your coworkers, a chance to hunker down and drive through projects faster, and possible extensive delays in communications.

Then factor in the possibility of children banging down the door to play, and the guilt you feel by having to shuffle them out to finish a project. Then a spouse who takes advantage of you "being there" for babysitting, phone calls, emotional chats, and I'd rather be at work during the day.

Then factor in the possibility of children banging down the door to play, and the guilt you feel by having to shuffle them out to finish a project. Then a spouse who takes advantage of you "being there" for babysitting, phone calls, emotional chats, and I'd rather be at work during the day.

You hit the nail on the head; that's exactly why I don't even try to telecommute. I tried setting up a room in my house with computers where I could go in, lock the door, and write software. My daughter would invariably starting banging on the door until I opened it, even if I spanked her for doing so. And my wife who feels that any whim she has is automatically the highest priority for the family doesn't see anything wrong with interrupting me no matter what I happen to be doing at the time to ask me to e

You should have never answered the door. She would have gotten tired, eventually. Yes, parents need to have more resiliency than their 5 yr olds. Electrifying the door would have also worked. Spanking the wife would be another option.

If my commute was longer, 45min+ and/or there was no parking I would take a small pay cut. By small I mean, savings of not driving or buying a parking pass. So probably 5%. However, I already get to work from home at least twice a week and my commute is only 20-25 min without a pay cut.

I moved from Cleveland to Seattle about a year ago and now I telecommute all the time. It definitely saves on gas and lunch expenses, since I usually just eat leftovers now. Overall, it's hard for me to say whether it's been like a raise or not since the cost of living is a bit higher here, but there is no state income tax. It is hard to put a price on the ability to roll out of bed, make a cup of copy, and start working.

I work for Rackspace full time from home, and I'm paid the same as I would be at the office. Whether I work from home or not is ultimately irrelevant, because the most important variable of all is loving your job. I work where I do because it is a truly amazing place to work.

That said, volunteering a pay cut is risky business. Your salary is a gauge of how much your company values you, so you should try to get as much as you possibly can.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. If you telecommute, it's also cheaper for the employer (less electricity, water, bandwidth, etc)2. If you take a pay cut, any time you get a raise it's going to be less than it could have been, since most companies do raises as a percentage of your current salary3. The downside of working exclusively from home is that it's easier to not get noticed. If you're not getting much face time with your peers, you better be doing some amazing work

because I do desktop support, including hardware diagnosis and repair.

However, in general I think being able to telecommute would be worth a small pay cut on account of less wear-and-tear on your car, less gas expended, and the extra free time - I drive 1:40 each day, round trip.

Couldn't sleep in later, though, because my kid needs me in the mornings.

I wouldn't take a pay cut, but I'd consider it a raise during an economy where most companies are stingy with raises. I could save $5000 a year on car costs alone (I'd only need one car if I worked from home). The trick is, to save that much cash, I would have to get rid of a car. That means I couldn't come in without planning far ahead. Most of the people in my company that work from home do it 2-3 days a week. I wouldn't want that.

If you can telecommute full time and do your job from the comfort of home, then so can anyone in the world. You're now competing with folks who would be happy to have your job at 10% of what you're paid -- not just a 10% discount!

I'm a software developer. A couple of years ago I interviewed with a small VOIP startup. The owner was Indian. He was replacing the positions he had outsourced in India with American developers because even with no cultural or language clashes he had trouble getting the level of quality he expected. While I'm sure it isn't the case with every position or every foreign subcontractor, the man was quite irrate that he was in fact getting what he was paying for.

For me, no. The value of what I do, the requirements and qualifications needed to do the work, and my employability elsewhere are not reduced by telecommuting (or lack thereof). Telecommuting is a perk, not compensation... and if it's the only way to get the job done (i.e. the employer is a "virtual office"), then it's just part of the circumstances of employment (and therefore still is not compensation).

If the same amount of work gets done, the same amount of salary gets paid. If someone else views telec

Then that means someone else lifts the servers, swaps the backup tapes/HDDs, gets interrupted by users while reading/.
Of course, that means I can't completely trust the servers or backup media. I'll always trust the users to find a way to interrupt me, so they're not a factor. In short, pay me more because I'm entailing more risk by being responsible for systems that I have less trust in.

I used to want that, but the more work I had that I could take home, the less it seemed like a good idea. To me that's like asking "Would you take a pay cut to always be on the job and move all your office crap in your bedroom?" Not a chance in hell.

When you factor in the full cost of commuting (fuel, maintenance, parking, higher food costs) 10% in some cases would be money ahead. Moreover, the entire time consumed by commuting, including dressing for outdoors, finding the keys, etc, is saved also. For me that would be around 2 additional hours a day I could spend doing something else, like, well, working.

Just in gas, it typically costs me $7800/yr in gas. So add in wear and tear plus insurance savings, its likely a break even at worst. For most people, working from home saves money for both the employee and the employer.

WTF are you doing (or driving) that requires $7800/yr in gas? My daily commute is 20 miles each way. Between that and general around-town driving (groceries, kids to soccer, etc.) I put 10 gallons in per week. At the current $3.50/gal, that's a $1820/yr. Are you on the wrong side of town for where you work?

I live in small city, I drive a big 5minutes each days but my salary is about a third (I use to think that I could double it but I recently turn down an offer at a conference and it was 3 times my current salary) of what it could be in a big city. But a paycut to stay home, no fucking way, not with a 5minutes drive....

I don't know anyone, except managers, who have had pay rises (even to keep up with inflation) in the last few years. Effectively, this is already a pay cut.

I wouldn't take any more of a cut, but I would consider working from home 2 or 3 days a week for the same money. That way I get to save a bit to make up for some of the inflationary pay cut and the company gets to save of "overheads" so the "investors" get a bigger earning per share this quarter.

I used to work for a major open source project at home for 2 years... it felt awesome for the first 6 months, but after that I felt terrible being at home alone all day long, every day. I have a few other friends who experienced something like that, working at home for large tech companies for various reasons - it's awesome for the first few months, but you'll feel really bad after a while.

The absolute best money the govt could put forward towards green initiatives is a heavy tax break based on number of telecommuters employed by a company.

It is absolutely absurd the amount of fuel I waste every year to unplug from my network at home just to drive to work to plug back in and perform the same job. In fact there are very few people in my office that really could not perform their job full time from home.

It is a figure of speech as well as a measure of desire to say that "I would take a pay cut...". In this case, it actually makes sense, but that still doesn't mean taking it literally....

I switched to full-time telecommute 10 years ago, and it definitely has financial advantages, in addition to enhancing your quality of life.

Career-wise was quite the change. Being out of immediate touch is a nice bonus, since you don't have to put up with all those 'quirky' people you work with, but you can still pull off informal social occasions with the co-workers you can stand.

Eventually, you become a 'virtual contractor' - you aren't really part of it, you are an outsider that does task work. This is the perfect segue into becoming a 'real contractor' and working for yourself.

If you time it right, you can arrange a 'buy out' from your employer, to help ease the transition, and from then on everything is great.

Next time you are listening to some doofus expand a 30s presentation into a 1 hour seminar; look at the people around you. Some will have a look of annoyance at their time being wasted; some will be asleep; some will be hanging on every word as if their next advancement depended upon it; and some will be quite serene. The latter is your contractor, because how your company wants to piss away its money doesn't bother them. They just want some to splatter on them.

I've worked out of my house and it should really come with a RAISE, not a pay cut.

First of all, who pays for high speed internet access? It can be a drag when someone in the house decides to stream a HD movie or some other bandwidth suck that slows network access. Sure, you can get another connection, but who pays for it? And in some cases, the broadband provider (yes, singular) won't deliver service to the same address twice, no matter how you explain it.

What about the computer equipment required? Am I supposed to use my home PC or will I be provided with a computer? What kind? Printer? Color, laser, etc?

Telephone? In some cases, a mobile would work, but in a lot of cases mobiles blow -- voice lag, weak signals, the whole laundry list of problems.

Then there's the SPACE issue. Most people I know don't have a huge empty spare room in their house they can put a proper desk, computer, printer, phone and all the crap associated with many jobs. If you have a wife and kids you definitely need to have a totally seperate room with a door you can close.

And then who pays for the other items? Electricity? Heat and A/C? Heat is significant -- I turn mine down WAY LOW in the daytime. Misc office supplies (paper, staples, pens, toner, etc)?

I doubt I'll ever be in the position to negotiate for it, but if someone said "we want you to work with us but its a telecommute position" I'd almost be tempted to negotiate the price of a small apartment and turn that into an office, or find one of those one-man-band offices that are kind of like a studio apartment.

There's so many BS small items associated with working from home that really add up you can't take a pay cut.

The government pays for the electricity, heat, and A/C, and mortgage/rent. Well half of it anyway.

Work supplies the office supplies.

Obviously if you don't have space to work from home, or a reliable internet connection, or whatever other requirements your job has then you can't work from home. That should just be so obvious you it doesn't need to be stated.

Telecompute is so.... 90s. I hate to say it. But we've moved past that.

The future is ROWE. Results Oriented Work Environment. In a ROWE only results matter. Not how you get it done, or where you get it do it.

In essence, if you can get your work done from a tropical island (with good wifi), then by all means do it. You are not paid for putting your butt in a seat, but rather for your productivity.

ROWE treats employees as adults who know how to manage their own time. Telecommuting, "flex time" and the like are just ways of rewarding employees with what they should already have... control over their lives.

ROWE came out of a successful experiment at Best Buy (HQ not retail stores). Its been adopted by a lot of big name companies, including Netflix.

Hey, there are arguments to be made. By coming in, the managerial tier gains the satisfaction of knowing that, while you may not be always working on something productive, you're at least not, say, looking at the kinds of things that most corporate filters are designed to block. Also, if your job sometimes involves labor or maintenance tasks (rebooting a server, swapping RAM...) they're increasing the amount of time necessary to get your butt on premises to fix it, and potentially impacting their business w

Rebooting a server.. not so much. All our servers have lights-out management or are VMs. And if you're paying me to swap a stick of RAM, you're paying over the odds.

And I can prove that I score better on certain productivity metrics while I work at home (like hours worked, lines of code committed, etc). Whereas when I'm in the office I have to content with a noisy open-plan designed to destroy productivity, and I have to skip out of the door at 1700 sharp to catch my ride home, instead of being able to stick with any problem that requires my extended attention until my daughter gets home from school.

So on the whole, I think it would be fair play to pay me the same, even though I'm actually providing more value for less cost to the enterprise, because I also benefit from it - I can do things like slip out for a run in my lunch hour that I would never be able to do at work.

Having to provide less office space, less resources, less money on utilities to keep up an office... yet IT people are expected to take the pay cut? We go into the office for them, not the other way around.

There's a flaw in your thinking: payroll is where people cost companies money, not presence. If employees switch to telecommuting the company's rent won't just magically shrink, nor will there be a substantial change in utility bills because there's one less computer on at the office; what employers really get from telecommuting is higher job satisfaction. On the employee's side, travel costs are reduced, they can actually sit in front of a window and have a beer while they work, breaks are potential fami

I had a glorious couple of months telecommuting till the "incident". There was some fall out, and psychological care needed for some in the conference room.

Later on, some people told me that watching me via webcam (when I knew it was on) was like watching evolution backwards. After a month and half they wondered if I just sat a semi-shaved ape in front of the monitor with a banana.

With some of the people I've worked with that have burst into my office screaming at me, or burst into private meeting threatening to beat me up, I'm not seeing the downside to not seeing people at the office. (As a contractor, you have zero recourse no matter how badly people treat you.)